We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
—Preamble to the Constitution of the United States
"The time for debate is over!" thundered Senator Hart. "I don't know if they came from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or outer space. What I do know is that each member of this body has sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They're here right now hiding among us, and they could attack at any time."
"Your effusive fearmongering notwithstanding, Mr. Hart, you're as aware as I am that these are hardly enemies in any conventional sense," rejoined Senator Braintree. There simply is no Constitutional mandate for us to legislate into existence the sort of preemptive countermeasures you've proposed. Besides, we're too deep in the red even to give the matter any serious consideration."
"I concur with Senator Braintree," continued Senator Liverton. "We can't afford any of this, and for that matter we don't even know they are our enemies, do we? There haven't been any attacks or casualties so far, and I dare say if they were to pose any real security threat—"
"IF?" fumed Hart. "I suppose you were about to say that IF there were an actual threat, we should just leave it to private enterprise and the free market to come up with some quick techno-fixes that would enable us to track 'em down, wipe 'em out, and jumpstart the economy. Well, that, too, Sir, would come at no small price, and more likely than not would come too late."
"Competitive bidding will keep the costs down in any event," retorted Liverton. "I repeat, we can't even say that they qualify as enemies, and preemption without some clear justification would only plunge us deeper into—"
"I can't believe what I'm hearing!" blasted Hart. "The threat is almost certain. Why else would they have infiltrated as they did? Why else have they remained so elusive? Did you not even hear the science panel's testimony? They are without question intelligent, they appear to have advanced engineering capabilities, and we can't rule out the possibility they pose a real and present danger."
"Mr. Hart, with all due respect, you're jumping to conclusions that border on the paranoid. Your groundless speculations are just the sort of thing that could drag us into another cold war. There simply is no proof that—"
Before Liverton could finish stating his objections, there was an ear-shattering explosion in the capitol. Braintree was knocked unconscious and tumbled headlong from the podium, his body pierced by thousands of wooden splinters and sliced and diced beyond recognition by countless shards of marble, glass, and metal. Hart and the other members of the Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence fell in bloody disarray as the coffered dome of the Chamber crashed down upon them, exposing their mutilated bodies to the open sky and glaring summer sun. Tens of thousands of leaves from Hart's voluminous draft of the Emergency Healthcare Defense Act lay scattered and fluttering in the rubble like a huge flock of dazed, grounded white pigeons.
Within the space of a few days the enemy had attacked every remaining member of the body, and the carnage persisted until no body remained. Just as quickly, the deficit dropped to zero, the market shut down, and law itself became irrelevant.
The Agonians have proven to be a particularly successful lightborne microbial species endowed with a superior collective intelligence enabling them to occupy a host planet; to remain dormant, virtually inconspicuous, and seemingly harmless for extended periods of time; and ultimately to achieve global control. This they accomplish by cloaking a planet en masse, setting off innumerable small-scale but immensely powerful explosive events through the rapid reconfiguration and weaponization of virtually any available matter, thus exposing their crushed, lacerated victims to light sources sufficient for immediate colonization and rapid consumption. They are known to seek out and target geopolitically fragmentary worlds in which the most advanced species exhibit militantly partisan tendencies; raise vast armies; and develop massive, mutually destructive weapons systems that generally dwarf by comparison any defensive universal healthcare networks that might have been created to protect their populations from the ever-present threat of invasion by hostile indigenous and alien microorganisms.
The origin of the Agonians is unknown, but the archaeological record indicates that in some traditional galactic cultures they were once revered as liberating angels.
Art: Detail from Self-Portrait with E. Coli, montage by Joseph Dillon Ford (2010).
